ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the discursive transformation of a charismatic female figure of low-caste background, Sarasvatī Devī (1752–1839), from a leader of the Kartābhajās, a putatively heterodox Sahajiyā Vaiṣṇava religious community in late 18th-century Bengal, to the deified Satīmā, considered by her followers and hagiographers to be a manifestation of Ᾱdiṥakti (Cosmic Mother) in human form. It shows that her leadership is contingent on the absence of suitable male leaders but later her spiritual authority is crystalized through the fame she acquires as a miracle-healer and through her role as a mediator when the ritual heterodoxies of her sect clashed with the mandate of the local Brahminical political authority.
Drawing on methodologies from intellectual history and intersectionality, the essay conceptualizes female agency as acts through which women carve for themselves a discursive space within the domain of ritual authority. Such acts of exerting agency can take the form of overlapping strategies to negotiate the hierarchies of gender, caste, and political power within which notions of religious authority are entrenched.
The chapter also addresses how deification becomes a discursive strategy to claim legitimacy for charismatic female figures operating at the margins of socio-political structures, which ironically obscure and erase the liminality and resistance to dominant structures which marked their historical agency as leaders.
